“The time has come…to talk of many [technologies].” –Lewis Carroll(‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’)
General
What is New in WordPress 2.3 (Beta 1/2)?
0[UPDATE 2: Mark Gosh has posted a nice summary of popular blog posts talking about what's new in WordPress 2.3. Must Read.
TWP website has a new podcast that previews WordPress 2.3 at the end of it.]
[UPDATE 1: WordPress 2.3 Beta 2 was released a couple of days ago. Importers are added for Jerome’s Keywords and Simple Tagging Plugins(importer for UTW was already there; read the post). Ryan Boren talks about how the plugin developers can use the new actions added to WordPress 2.3 related to status changes of the posts(Draft -> Pending, Pending -> Published etc).]
The first beta of a new version of WordPress blogging engine, 2.3, was released a few hours ago. WordPress aficionados might already know the new major and minor features that were being planned(and some of them later shelved ;) ) for this release through mailing lists and other sources but for the others, below is a summary of a few changes that can be found in the new WordPress 2.3 interface. Go through them and if you later decide to dig deeper into these new features, you only have to download WordPress 2.3 Beta 1 Beta 2(~1MB) and give it a try in XAMPP!
What’s new in WordPress 2.3 Beta 1?
- The most important improvement in WordPress 2.3 version is the built-in support for tagging of blog posts with relevant keywords in technorati style. There is no need to install a separate plugin like Ultimate Tag Warrior now. The text box shown below allows as many tags to be associated with a given post as is needed.
The tables used to manage the categories are now replaced by new tables to manage the tags i.e. wp_categories, wp_post2cat and wp_link2cat are replaced by the tables wp_terms, wp_term_taxonomy, wp_term_relationships. Lot of information on tag support is available on the Internet(especially email archives), so treat Google as your friend. More on database schema changes
- A new state in which the draft posts can now be saved under is “Pending Review.” It is useful when not all the authors are supposed to be allowed to publish their posts to the weblog before first being reviewed by an editor or an administrator.
Which means that drafts can be of two types now: posts still under editing(Draft) and posts that are ready to be published(Pending Review); there was no good way to differentiate like this earlier. An efficient way to immediately inform the contributor that the Pending Review post has been pushed back to Draft state by the editor, perhaps with a custom message attached explaining the reason for it, is however absent. EMail/IM etc are the alternate options for now; someone can write a plugin in the future that fills this need. (More info)
Also, Manage -> Posts now contains a drop-down box from which one can filter posts belonging to different states: Draft, Pending Review, Published and Private. So it can be used as a convenient place to access all the draft posts together. Similar filtering can be done based on Categories too. To search posts based on tags or other keywords, the same old search box can be used.
- A new button on the WYSIWYG editor toolbar can be used to show (and hide) a second (new) toolbar which has got additional editing buttons. These buttons allow operations such as underlining of text, font colour selection, inserting <H> tags, undo-ing, pasting directly from MS Word document etc.
I always use the plain text editor so it doesn’t matter to me how many additional buttons are added to the WYSIWYG editor! Doesn’t matter to those too who use their own favourite WYSIWYG editor in WordPress.
- For those blogs that use the popular plugin Ultimate Tag Warrior to manage the tags, WordPress 2.3 Beta 1 has an importing tool to import those tags to its own native tag format(importing Simple Tagging Plugin tags and Jerome’s Keywords likely in the 2.3 final version it’s there in Beta 2). POC(Plain Old Categories) can also be converted to tags using the provided converter tool. These two options can also be accessed from the Manage -> Import page.
- One of the first things I ever do after installing WordPress is hide all the links from the default blogroll. The links now point to various resources related to WordPress project instead of blogs of important WordPress developers, but I still think I will have to hide them when upgrading to 2.3 version. Or make it visible only to the blog administrator.
- There are many other differences too, like file sizes in Manage -> Uploads section, Categories Widgets, Plugin (and core) Update Notifier etc.
Download it and try it out by yourself. Or check-out the source directly from the subversion repository to keep updated with the latest changes. WordPress Planet website should keep us posted on the latest information on WordPress 2.3′s journey towards the final release(more detailed than WordPress development blog anyway).
Akismet Kills 100,001th Spam Comment on My Blog
0A couple of days ago, Akismet killed 100,001th comment of this blog.
If not for Akismet, I would’ve had to either lock-down the comment section or pass every comment through the tiresome moderation process. Lately I have come across many other tools that further help in countering the spam menace (each of them in a different way) but Akismet alone is fine for me for now. The latest statistics of this blog are like this:
A job well done, Akismet.
Asia Catches Up with GNU/Linux Distributions – A Distrowatch Report
0Distrowatch Weekly Newsletter notes in its 13th August 2007 issue that Asia is fast catching up with the readership of Distrowatch.com website, which roughly translates to a keen interest in keeping in touch with, and downloading, various GNU/Linux and BSD distributions. The following table should shed some light on this development:
| Rank | Country/Territory | 2006 | 2007 | % Change |
| 1 | Japan (JP) |
328,336 | 347,879 | +6.0% |
| 2 | China (CN) |
151,915 | 209,203 | +37.7% |
| 3 | India (IN) |
80,889 | 137,702 | +70.2% |
| 4 | Indonesia (ID) |
72,668 | 112,998 | +55.5% |
| 5 | Turkey (TR) |
67,465 | 101,789 | +50.9% |
Number of visits from Japan were very high even in 2006 but the increase in visits from India over just seven months since then is remarkable. The above four countries(other than Japan) have registered around 50% increase in the same period, India leading the table by a big margin. This is what Distrowatch has to say about it:
While Japan has been maintaining the top position since the beginning of this web site, it’s interesting to note the dramatic growth of readership in the two most populous countries in the world – China and India. With a handful of exceptions, the number of readers visiting DistroWatch has been on the increase and a total number of Asian-based readers have grown by more than 20% since a year ago.
Source: Distrowatch
Intel’s Threading Building Blocks(TBB) Library Available under GPL
0
Intel Threading Building Blocks (TBB), a popular software C++ template library that simplifies the development of software applications running in parallel (key to any multicore computer), is now available as an open source project under the GNU General Public License version two (GPLv2) with the runtime exception.
But what is Intel TBB template library?
For developers:
- TBB significantly reduces the number of lines of code required to develop multithreaded applications;
- TBB significantly reduces the programming complexity for developing multithreaded applications (by abstracting many details of thread management);
- TBB’s task manager automatically analyzes the system the software is running on, chooses the optimal number of threads, and performs load balancing that spreads out the work evenly across all processor cores;
- As a result, TBB threaded applications automatically scale to fully utilize all available processing cores on whatever computer they run on – including future systems that will have many more cores than are available (or affordable) today.
Quotes from Intel’s website.
More information:
Introductory Article on TBB
O’reilly Book on TBB
Download TBB (Installation documentation on TBB website is incorrect for the GPL version; see Forums)
Intel TBB Home Website
TBB Forums and Blog (not yet content heavy)
Why Nokia N800 Is An Ideal Device For Me
6
The reason I had decided to buy Nokia N800 Internet Tablet the very first week it was released, even before I could read decent reviews about the product, was that it is based on the highly customisable/extensible GNU/Linux platform. Also its predecessor Nokia N770 had already tasted reasonable success. Few things that could’ve been expected were that N800 might smooth-out some of the complaints that the early N770 users had(also fixed in N770 through updates) but it might not support as many applications in the first quarter of 2007 as N770 did. But I had trust in the Free software developer community that within an year or so, N800 can boast of more applications than any other device in its category. Less than six months since its release, I am already enjoying a number of applications ported to N800 platform(Skype is still missing! Not anymore).
I used the device for the first few months deliberately not installing any of the applications available in Nokia or third-party repositories to see how useful the device would be in its default state. I must say that most of the functionality I was looking for was already available in the device. One thing needs to be stressed here though: Nokia N800 is not a phone, it’s also not a wannabe phone. It’s just an Internet Tablet that allows voice based communication over Internet through applications like Google Talk(comes pre-installed in the device). If being able to call a traditional phone is high on the wish list, even though it might just be possible with N800 when Skype will be is ported to it, still I would say that it is definitely not the device for you. Nokia N800 vs iPhone just doesn’t make any sense to me(though it is fun mocking the Apple/Microsoft products :) ).
Now coming to why N800 is so perfect for me:
- Browse Internet from anywhere in the house/office/etc. It’s better than a laptop because it is such a small device, it is so easy to carry it around the whole house, and even a bit farther too, if my access point can throw the signal that far. Thankfully it doesn’t come with some crappy old web browser that can’t handle anything beyond WML/HTML – N800 comes with full-blown Opera 8 web browser with good support for even Web 2.0/Ajaxified websites. The web pages can be zoomed in and out to increase/decrease font size etc of a page with a simple button press. The wireless connectivity is easy to set up(when I powered the device on, it searched and showed all my three access points, and after I selected one of them, it has been connecting to it without I having to repeat the selection process) and it has never dropped the connection. I can lay down on a couch while doing casual web browsing, download files, save or bookmark pages. Before going to shop for electronic items, I browse through all the products at home, and instead of taking notes, I just save the pages on the device and carry it with me to the shops. This would’ve been unnecessary if the shopping complexes in my area had WiFi access points or if Webaroo kind of application were supported for N800.
- Audio and Video Player. I have never bought an MP3 player in my life. I have seen and ignored people around me buying iPods, Creative players etc but I never could see how a 5″x3″ sized device that didn’t also play video could be useful to me. iPod Video and Creative Zen Vision:M now support video too, but their screen size is like a joke to me. I was considering buying Creative Zen Vision:W(after disappointing experience with Creative Portable Media Center) which has a dream screen-size. N800 made it unnecessary as it plays MPEG, DivX, XviD, FLV etc. formats and I can copy the video files like copying any other file on a PC: no cumbersome synchronisation process using a tailor-made software is required. I am not completely happy with the video playback capability of N800 though. Without installing additional software, it plays only MPEG files. With proper codec support, it plays a lot more video formats. I wish that as long as the video is in a resolution compatible with the device, it should play most of the popular formats without additional software(just a single additional application like MPlayer is fine; most of us are going to install it anyway). The bass in audio playback is non-existent with the headphones that come with the device. I exchanged them with Creative E880 earphones and MP3 playback is nearly as good as iPod – with a better user interface.
-
Voice/Video Chat. Google Talk is pre-installed in Nokia N800 and N800 comes with built-in microphone and a video/web camera, so it’s at least as effective as chatting on a PC using a Web Camera, only a lot more convenient. The web camera especially can be rotated 360 degrees but is useful only while video chatting. It can not be used as a stand-alone camera either to take pictures or to record video. An application is available through Nokia repository that enables N800 to take pictures through this camera but I found the quality of the pictures to be too bad. You can’t imagine how bad. Google Talk is more than sufficient for my needs as I don’t carry N800 around the town to take pictures with it. - EBook Reader with FBReader. N800 may not be a dream device for the regular ebook readers but for a casual reader like me, it has enough features(except support for bookmarks) to make me happy. FBReader doesn’t come with N800 pre-installed but installing it from the “Application Manager” is a trivial task. It supports plenty of ebook formats and allows switching to portrait or landscape mode. N800 supports increasing/decreasing font size and full-screen reading mode.
- FM Radio. When I get bored listening to all the MP3s present on the device, I tune into the local FM channels for variety. Earphones are needed to act as antenna for FM tuning. A small application also needs to be installed.
-
Support for more than 8GB memory! The device officially supports only 2GB cards but even that means 4GB in total as the device comes with two memory slots. 4GB SD cards come very cheap these days and work just fine with N800 – I have 2 x 4GB = 8GB memory. 8GB SDHC cards can also be used(so the total becomes 16GB of memory!) but a modified kernelan official update (2007) needs to be installed which though is straightforward but not a trivial task. - Terminal! I wouldn’t have bought the device if the terminal was not supported on it. The device can run ssh server, vnc server too so that it can be accessed from another computer.
- Acts as USB storage device, doesn’t need a memory card reader or custom software. Most of the devices require a custom software to talk to the device even for simple file transfers. Some devices allow the memory cards to be removed from the device and attached to the computers through memory card readers. N800 connects to the computer through a USB cable and acts as a regular USB storage device(just like iPods do – for file transfers. For audio/video transfers, iTunes is needed). The big plus point of this feature, apart from the fact that a software doesn’t have to be installed before connecting the device to a computer and a memory card reader is not needed, is that it can be accessed from a gnu/linux system too. This may seem an insignificant feature who haven’t struggled and failed to connect 9 out of 10 devices to their primary operating system.
So that’s my list though I can add a few more features to it easily.
If you are looking for a balanced review of the product, inquirer has a good one:
Nokia’s cheap UMPC alternative is future-proof
Google for more info.
Recent Comments